Latest / The Not-Boring Tech Writer / Kate sounds off on self-documentation
Transcript
- Kate Mueller: [00:00:04] Welcome to The Not-Boring Tech Writer, a podcast sponsored by KnowledgeOwl. Together, we explore topics and hear from other writers to help inspire us, deepen our skills, and foster our distinctly not-boring tech writing community. [00:00:21] Hello lovely, not-boring tech writers. I'm Kate Mueller, and this is one of our solo episodes where I share things I'm thinking about or working on. I'm recording this episode at the end of November, over the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and only two weeks after recording my previous solo episode. The end of year crunch is real, my friends. First, my progress update, which I'm so excited to share with you: since my last episode, I finished the project I had been updating you on for all of 2025. Wow. In total, I updated or created 743 articles, I archived 14, I completed a tags audit and I updated all of our internal guidance on using tags, and I submitted a pull request to Microsoft's Entra Docs because they have a page on setting up KnowledgeOwl SSO that needed to be updated. Along the way, there were some feature subcategories that I skipped reorganizing, or I did a very quick and dirty reorganization on, but since those weren't part of my original scope, I decided to keep a list and come back to them later. I also found some other things completely unrelated to the updates I was making, those also went into the list. Now, next up on my list for the coming month is digging into the list of things I punted on. Kate Mueller: [00:01:48] I'll also be catching up on some of the docs backlog that developed while I was in the final throes of this project, and I'm hoping to finally develop some standards and guidelines for our feature champions to draft their own docs. They've been doing it without guidance for a couple months, and it's high time I actually provided some and figured out what that review process and workflow is really going to look like. It took me almost a year to do this, and it would probably be easy to look at that and be frustrated about how long it took. But considering I often only had between 1 and 5 hours a week to work on this project, I kind of refuse to feel bad about it. These weren't simple "find and replace" wording updates. I was substantively updating to align with our current style guide. I was taking new screenshots with new formatting. I was often splitting pages up differently, or reorganizing content, or making other significant changes. There are a lot of reasons why it took as long as it did. Had I just replaced the wording, I probably could have finished this within 2 or 3 months, and maybe that would have been a better experience for our readers, but I'm happy with the choices I made. Kate Mueller: [00:03:08] My documentation feels better than it ever has, and I now have a giant list of additional changes I'd like to make, so there's no shortage of work. Not that there ever is, but it has made me a lot more excited to do a lot of this maintenance work, because I'm feeling like the work that I've done speaks really well. It's a definite improvement, and that's always a great feeling. [00:03:35] I've also been reflecting a bit on my interview with Kate Pond, and I promise it's not just because we share the same first name—though that is always a point in her favor [laughter]. One of the things that stuck with me from chatting with Kate was thinking about the value of self-documentation. In the episode we talked about a Google Form she set up to do daily check-ins at the end of her workday. I went back to her blog post after we recorded the episode and reread it, and for her daily check-ins, she listed nine questions that she used. The first was a checkbox question for "how do you feel?" with a whole bunch of different named emotions as the options, plus an "other" category. Then she had a text box for what she worked on. Then she had a multiple choice question for "who did you work with?" as well as a long text box to provide more detail on what that project was, how it went, what could have been done better, etc. Kate Mueller: [00:04:41] Then she had short text boxes for things like "one thing I learned today," "one thing I'd like to follow up on," "one thing I could do better tomorrow," "one thing I'm proud of," and then a single long text box for a leadership example, which might include the event or situation or circumstance, plus what she did to handle it. I really liked this idea of using a Google Form for a daily check in, so I decided I'd create a form for myself just to add more work, I guess. There were a few different reasons why I chose this path. The first is that we currently have a scheduled weekly check-in at KnowledgeOwl, and that check in used to be on a platform where I could do a separate entry each day as the day went on. Now it's just a single survey I fill out at the end of the week. And as I've mentioned before, part of why I document stuff is because I don't remember it very well [laughter], so I know that when I'm doing this weekly check-in, I am not remembering all the work I did each week. And I'm also guessing that my weekly rating is being super skewed based on however it is I'm feeling when I actually fill out that form. Part of this is just that I want to have slightly better data. Kate Mueller: [00:06:00] The second reason is that I often forget the details of my day to day, but I am particularly bad about this when it comes to how heavily or in how much detail I am collaborating with other owls. And at KnowledgeOwl, we share high fives and appreciation for other owls, both in Slack as well as at the end of individual meetings. We get to this section, I know it's coming and then it's like my mind goes blank. I'm like, "I know I worked with people this week. I know I was really excited about it. I know they helped a whole bunch, but I can't think of anything specific to say here." So I'm hoping that this new daily check-in format also gives me an easy, less stressful way to make sure that I'm giving credit to the awesome coworkers I have. [00:06:54] The third and final reason I'm playing around with doing this daily check-in is that there's a lot of interesting things happening in a couple of my contracts right now, including my role at KnowledgeOwl. I have this suspicion that sometime in the next year, I'm going to have to make some hard decisions about how and where I spend my time, maybe cutting off some contracts, maybe pursuing some new ones. But I really want to be very clear with myself about what kind of work I'm pursuing or not pursuing. Kate Mueller: [00:07:28] Right now, I just have some sort of general feelings and instincts about that, and I really want to be able to come at it from a place of feeling informed. My hope is that by tracking it in a more structured way, I can make those decisions both more obvious, but also much easier and less stressful for myself. In an ideal world, they'll become self-evident, right? So I used [Kate Pond’s] list from her blog post as a starting place for myself, and then I iterated on it based on what felt like it fit well for me with the kinds of things I feel like I need to know right now. [00:08:06] Here's what I've come up with for my own Google Form, for my daily check-ins, in case it's useful for you. I'm starting with a "rate how you feel right now" question, but instead of having named emotions and putting myself through the cognitive stress of trying to put a good label on how I feel, I'm just doing a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is "I'm miserable", and 5 is "This is awesome. It doesn't even feel like work." Then I have a "what did you work on today?" text box, so I can summarize what I'm going to do. When I started playing with the form, I had multiple questions for this, depending on the type of work I'm doing, so different contracts I have—like, here at KnowledgeOwl, I work on both documentation and the podcast as well as learning materials. I originally tried having separate questions for all of that, but it felt super overwhelming, so I went back to a single text box, and I'm just going to rely on myself to do paragraph breaks or whatever in there to describe what I'm doing. Hopefully that works. I then have a series of checkboxes for "who did you collaborate with?" so I can give myself a very easy report of who I worked with that day, and then an optional text box to go with that, where I can provide more detailed notes. This is the piece that I'm hoping will help me better give high fives and appreciations to coworkers. And then I have small text boxes for three things: "What's one thing you're proud of today?", "What's one thing you wish had gone better today?", and "Tomorrow I hope to...", so that I can set at least one goal, maybe more than one goal, so that I can remember the next day where I thought I left off. To go along with this, I've set up a Slack reminder so that it'll ping me near the end of my workday to prompt me to go fill out the form, and we'll see how that goes. I'll report back on this experiment for sure in my next solo episode. Maybe in the next couple, depending on whether I can get it to stick or I abandon it. Both during my interview with Kate Pond and in the weeks since, I've spent a lot of time thinking about self-documentation, and when we recorded the interview, I went off on this little rant about a very different form of self-documentation that I had used that had nothing to do with work that was really about managing some stuff in my personal life and my physical well-being. I didn't feel like it fit well into the interview episode, it really did feel like a tangent in the sense that it diverted the conversation for a period of time. My original plan was to go listen to that clip and then give you a summary of it here, but on listening to it back, I realized, I think you should just get the sort of unbridled, unfiltered, more spontaneous version and then let me talk about it after. So here's the clip itself. [00:11:23] I did a thing of self-documentation for a while that was completely not work related. The chronic illness I have is Long Covid, and I got sick with Covid the first time in March of 2020 when nobody knew anything about it and nobody knew Long Covid was a thing. That's back when we didn't have tests. You were supposed to try to ride it out at home to save the hospital beds for people who were actively dying. They thought it was like pneumonia, and as long as you cleared it, you'd be fine, right? And within the first couple months, it was very clear to me that something was not right with my body coming back from it. And the doctors didn't know anything. I mean, they still don't know very much about it, but they really didn't know anything at that time. And they were just like, “oh, I guess give it more time and just try to rest.” And I was like, “I can barely get out of bed. I don't think lack of rest is the problem here.” And so what I started doing was basically a daily check-in. I'd wake up in the morning, I'd give myself a numeric rating on how I felt. I'd track the symptoms that I had at the start of the day. I'd track the symptoms I had at the end of the day. I'd track what I drank, what I ate. And then at that time, there's a lot of stuff circulating: “Oh, try vitamin D, it'll help with the brain fog. Try this, try that.” And I'd be like, “all right, I'll try one of those things for like two weeks and I'll see if my overall number improves or any of my symptoms improve. If not, okay, I'm not doing that thing.” But it was very similar, "let me chart the daily" because as you document that, it is like there's a part of your brain that goes, “oh, I should maybe be paying attention to see if there are patterns happening here.” So I discovered a new food allergy I didn't know I had because I kept being like, “huh?” I was tracking what I was eating, and then I was tracking my symptoms and I was like, “boy, every time I eat chicken, the next day I get hives. Maybe I just won't eat chicken anymore.” And then, lo and behold, it hugely reduced the occurrence I had of hives. Was I doing formal analysis on that? Oh goodness, no, not at all. I was writing it down in a notebook. It was all paper, but it was this part of my brain that was like, “I should be paying a little bit—not conscious attention—but a little bit of subconscious attention to think about, are there patterns here?” And when you start documenting that every day, sometimes the subconscious says, “Hey, wait a minute. There is a correlation here between when you do X kind of work, then you feel better or worse. Why don't you explore that a little bit? Why is that? Is it that you're working with somebody you don't like working with? Is it that you actually like the work, but it's too much to do in a given day?” It allows you to then have a much more nuanced conversation with yourself about, “okay, I see that this pattern is here, but why do I think that pattern occurs? And is it a pattern I can do anything about?” If I know that I really hate doing a particular kind of work, but I am my best at doing it first thing in the morning, I like to get it over with so that it's not hanging over me for the rest of the day. If I've discovered this because I've realized that by doing it at different times a day, my overall rating for the day is wildly different, that's a really useful piece of information. To be like: “Okay, I hate doing this task. However, if I do it first and then I reward myself with something I really like, I don't really notice how much I hate that task.” But if it's the last thing I do in the day, I'm going to leave work in a rotten mood. I'm going to be grumpy mcgrumpagus to everybody I interact with. Let’s not do that! [Laughter] Kate Pond: [15:09] Yeah, for sure. Knowing this information about yourself and about others is really important in a lot of your aspects of life. Kate Mueller: [15:19] This episode is sponsored by KnowledgeOwl, your team's next knowledge base solution. You don't have to be a technical wizard to use KnowledgeOwl. Our intuitive, robust features empower teammates of all feathers to spend more time on content and less time on administration. Learn more and sign up for a free 30-day trial at knowledgeowl.com. Kate Mueller: [15:43] There are a few threads in this clip that I find myself coming back to, and this is why I wanted to include it in this episode. To start with, self-documentation doesn't have to have anything to do with work. It doesn't have to be technical. You don't have to use a formal tool for it. You don't necessarily need data. It also doesn't have to be journaling. I think we hear the phrase “self-documentation” and a lot of people assume that that means journaling, and it can, but it doesn't have to. I think part of [Kate Pond’s] argument, and also the argument I'm making in that little tangent clip, is that just providing yourself some structure to document some elements of your current reality can be really meaningful. So if you have a thing in your life that would benefit from some extra attention and some thoughtful tracking, that's the kind of thing we want here. Kate Mueller: [16:41] Self-documentation can also have a big psychological impact, especially in situations where you feel like things are totally beyond your control. With my Long Covid documentation, I suddenly felt like I went from being trapped and powerless due to this illness and the utter lack of systemic support for it, to feeling like I was actually doing something to try to change my situation. It introduced a sense of agency. It introduced a sense of empowerment. Even though it was just tracking information, symptoms, and feelings at the time, that data became useful for me to make informed decisions later. So I would strongly encourage you to think about daily check-ins if you are feeling really stuck or trapped or stagnant right now. That might be, you're out of work and you're really struggling to find work. It might be that you're stuck in a job you hate, or maybe you have this really difficult situation at work that's eating up a ton of space in your head, and because of that, you can't see the good stuff that's happening around that, and you need the little bit of perspective. Whatever it might be, it may be that the act of tracking this stuff in a structured way, and being thoughtful about it, may help you find some useful patterns or insights about what you could do or what you'd rather be doing. And that gives you more of that sense of empowerment and agency. [00:18:21] In addition, self-documentation, if used well, can encourage you to experiment to identify things that are or aren't working for you. And I'm going to stress the word “experiment” here. So you're using this structured daily check-in in whatever capacity to capture some data about your reality, and after a while you get this kind of baseline. Then what I want you to do is to try changing one thing for two weeks and see what happens. Does it have an effect on your "how am I feeling?" measures? Did it help you stay more focused, or maybe it distracted you? Did you find that you worked better with certain people as a result of it, or you were able to get through something that had really been hanging over you? Or did it increase that sense of overwhelm or out of controlness? It is very much an experiment, scientific method-ing your own life or your job. You change one thing and then you see what effect that change has. And if you like it, you keep it. And if you don't, drop it and try something else. I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do really love doing experiments. Kate Mueller: [19:37] Finally, self-documentation is also useful for the reason that I harped on in that clip. The act of documenting something makes you think about it differently. You pay more attention. You seem to pick up on patterns better, even without crunching numbers from the data itself. It's like your mind realizes that this thing is important, and you start to subconsciously recognize patterns before you ever consciously do. You've kind of primed your mind to tell it that you want it to pick up on subtleties here. While I imagine that the daily check-in Google Form I've created will be useful for evaluating the work I'm doing and how I collaborate with others and what types of work I'm finding most and least fulfilling right now, I also expect that I might not even have to look at my entries to figure that out. Just filling out the form consistently may already give my mind the nudge it needs to pay attention to useful patterns. [00:20:44] Speaking of paying attention to useful patterns, Kate Pond's interview also provides some great ideas for folks transitioning from one career path to another. I mean, park ranger to software engineer is a pretty big leap, and what I'm going to try to do here is to distill her transition down to an overly simplified list of behaviors, so here we go. First, be willing to try new things. Kate didn't explicitly mention this, but for me, so much of her story seems based on the idea of being okay with being wildly uncomfortable. Out of the gate, she began attending tech meetups on languages and technologies she had never heard of. She didn't mention it, but I'm sure that elements of that were intimidating, that they were full of discomfort, that she probably had a whole bunch of weirdness about going to them, and yet she didn't let that stop her. She just showed up and tried the new thing. [00:21:47] Second, expose yourself to a bunch of ideas. In Kate's case, that was attending meetups, so you could consider attending meetups in your area, but that might also include taking classes, reading blogs, or articles by big names in the space, listening to podcasts like this one in whatever space you want to get into. To me, part of Kate's successful transition is about her willingness to leap into the unknown, but to also sponge up as much knowledge as she could once she was there. [00:22:20] And part of that is strategy three, which is to take notes on the pieces you don't understand. Document them, then research them to find answers so that you do understand, then go back and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. This is where that habit of documenting stuff becomes meaningful, because you're documenting the gaps that you know you still need to fill. [00:22:48] Four, and finally, when you feel ready, find a more structured learning path that makes sense for you. Now, in Kate's case, she was making the transition from non-tech to tech, and there are some really good paths for that that are highly structured. She did a coding academy program of some kind. I think especially if you're trying to get out of tech, that's a lot harder. There aren't as many clear paths for that, but that might be taking a class or two, whether that's an official college level class or an online course of some kind. It might be attending webinars that might be free around those topics from key players in the space. You could do an internship. You could shadow a coworker. Think about the structures that work best for you and look for those. Kate Mueller: [23:42] Maybe my favorite takeaway from this interview was a reminder of why and how I got into tech writing in the first place. And I think very often, especially in the interviews in this podcast, you'll hear tech writers talk about how much they enjoy explaining things for other people, that they like breaking complicated things down into simpler terms to help people be successful with a product or a service, or just that they really like sharing the knowledge that they have. Kate [Pond] reminded me of a key piece of my own tech writing villain origin story, which is less lofty than that: I just wanted to save myself or my coworkers’ time. When she was talking about this, she mentioned that when she was an RA, she would create these runbooks for herself for how to do things like, "I need to schedule an event for my residents. Who do I have to contact? What are the steps involved?" And this for me is very much my origin story with tech writing. The number of times that I did this long before I called myself a tech writer—long before I called this technical documentation—they're so numerous. At that call center job I had several lifetimes ago, I built this little Microsoft Access database with a form front end, and I think I would classify my first-ever piece of technical documentation as a set of instructions for my coworkers to learn how to use the filters and navigate through that form. Kate Mueller: [25:30] In a later job, I had to perform these Outlook mail merges once every 4 to 8 weeks, and I would email between 2,000 and 5,000 people at a time. The email list I got needed a lot of cleaning and other stuff to happen, and I found an Excel macro that would do a whole bunch of that work for me. And after the second or third time where I couldn't remember how to use the macro and spent an insane amount of time trying to troubleshoot it, I was like, “I'm going to write myself instructions on this. This is silly. I should not be relearning how to use this macro every time I use it.” I just wanted more of my time back. I think this is the entry point for a lot of people into tech writing. It's just solving a very immediate need, and for me, that's a totally fine place if that's all the tech writing you do ever is. These are steps and procedures. They are simplifying a complex thing. They might not be about being successful with a product or service, they might just be, "Hey, let me save myself time or save other people time." They don't have a huge audience. They might only be designed for a small team, or they might have an audience of one, which is me. And I appreciate how much time that saves me. It's a gift to my future self. Kate Mueller: [26:56] One of my goals with this show has always been, but is especially now a goal moving forward: to invite more of these “not official” tech writers or “intermittent” tech writers like Kate [Pond], who would never call themselves a tech writer, but who are nonetheless creating technical documentation. This might be developers creating cheat sheets for themselves or their coworkers, customer experience or customer support agents creating saved replies, or quick and dirty FAQs. Even something as seemingly simple as a freelancer, I'm writing instructions to my clients and how to view and pay their invoices. It's all technical writing. So far on the podcast, under my hosting anyway, we have had a fairly obvious skew toward software and product documentation—in part because that's my background, that's a lot of the network I have, and I think it's also a lot of what people think of when they think of tech writing. But I'm really hoping to broaden the way we talk about tech writing on this podcast, and hopefully the way we talk about tech writing out in the world, by inviting more voices from the tech writing-adjacent spheres onto the show. So if you or someone you know who isn't an official tech writer, but you've written instructions for library patrons, or some kind of guide for your fantasy football league counterparts—I don't even know what you call somebody else in a fantasy football league, it's not my jam, but other fantasy football league people. Or you've written recipes for friends, or you've written instructions so that your aging parent can stop locking themselves out of their bank account, email account, Facebook account. I want to hear from you. These are forms of technical writing. Send me your guest suggestions, whether it's for yourself or for people you know or you work with. And help me bring you even more unusual and interesting and not-boring intermittent tech writer stories. And if you have other ideas for topics or guests, if there's a bit of the tech writing world that your life would be improved by hearing an episode on, or if you'd just like to tell us what you're getting out of the show, please message us on LinkedIn or Bluesky (@thenotboringtechwriter.com) or email tnbtw@knowledgeowl.com. [00:29:44] The Not-Boring Tech Writer is co-produced by our podcast Head of Operations, Chad Timblin, and me. Post-production is handled by the lovely humans at Astronomic Audio with editing by Dillon, transcription by Madi, and general post-production support by Been and Alex. Our theme song is by Brightside Studio. Our artwork is by Bill Netherlands. You can order The Not-Boring Tech Writer t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and other merch from the Merch tab on thenotboringtechwriter.com. You can check out KnowledgeOwl's products at knowledgeowl.com. And if you want to work with me on docs, knowledge management coaching, or revamping an existing knowledge base, go to knowledgewithsass.com. Until next time, I'm Kate Mueller, and you are the not-boring tech writer.